Changing the Comment Color

Excel allows you to add comments to individual cells in a worksheet. These are handy for keeping notes pertaining to the contents of a cell. (How you add comments is discussed in other ExcelTips.) When you later move your mouse pointer over the top of a cell that has a comment associated with it, a small pop-up box appears that shows the comment.

The normal color for the comment box is a pale yellow, to supposedly mimic the appearance of the paper sticky notes that we all know and love so well. What if you don't like pale yellow sticky notes, however? In that case, you may be looking for a way to change the color Excel uses for the comment box.

The news here is both bad and good. It is bad because Excel doesn't have a way to change just the color of the comment box. The good news is that Excel relies on the system colors set in Windows to determine what color the comment boxes should be. Excel uses the ToolTip color setting for the comment boxes. If you want to change that setting, follow these steps if you are using Windows 7:

Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose Personalize from the resulting Context menu. Windows displays the Personalization portion of the Control Panel.

Click Window Color at the bottom of the window. Windows displays the Color and Appearance options for your display.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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